Romine looking for a chance to contribute to Tigers

Shortstop Andrew Romine has not yet had a chance to play in a regular-season game for the Tigers in their first two games, and his first chance to start on Thursday was washed out by rain.
CARLOS OSORIO — THE ASSSOCIATED PRESS

DETROIT >> When you play a sport your whole life — alongside your brother, and in the footsteps of your father — you’re bound to accumulate some memorabilia.

When Andrew Romine and his fiancee moved into a new home a month before he was traded to the Detroit Tigers, both of them had keepsakes from years worth of milestones to put up on the wall.

“I just moved into a house this past offseason, so I got a little ‘I love myself’ room where I’ve got some stuff up on the wall my first hit bat, my first ball. It was kind of exciting getting all that stuff up there, and step back and look at it and go ‘This is cool!’” said the shortstop, a second generation Major League Baseball player, admitting he spends quite a bit of time in the jokingly-named room, which doubles as the couple’s office. “It’s the pump-up room. Whenever we’re not feeling good about ourself, or anything, we can just go in there and say ‘Man, we’re pretty good at stuff.’”

The 28-year-old Romine hasn’t had much opportunity to add to that collection since belatedly joining the Tigers at the end of spring training.

“A little bit, but that’s part of the job, too,” admitted Romine, whose father, Kevin, was an outfielder with the Red Sox in the late 1980s, and whose younger brother, Austin, is a catcher in the Yankees’ system. “If you’re not playing, you’ve got to find some way to help the team win.”

As of now, it appears that will be as a utility infielder, much the same role he’s had in two stints with the Angels the last two seasons. He’ll be splitting time at shortstop with a later trade acquisition, the 37-year-old Alex Gonzalez, but possibly playing some second or third base.

“When you watch him at short, he looks like a shortstop. Which I think we’ve spoken to the importance of the defensive side of that position for us,” manager Brad Ausmus said. “He brings some other things to the table as far as athletic ability. He runs well. He can steal a base. He hits from both sides, but generally you’ll probably see him more from the left side.”

A natural right-hander, Romine learned to switch hit from his father when he was very young, but dropped hitting right-handed for a short period last season. He went back to it later in the season, when it didn’t work out.

“I gave it a time period. I said I’m going to give it until the All-Star break and if it’s significantly worse, then I’m going to go back to switch hitting and it was. It was. I give a lot of credit to those guys who can hit left-on-left well, because that’s hard to do,” he said.

“It was tough. It wasn’t killing me inside because I knew I gave myself a time period to perform and if it wasn’t I could go back to a fallback almost to what I would normally do, so it was more of trying to just, maybe I could stumble upon something that I hadn’t known before, because I had hit right-handed off lefties my whole life, so I never even tried it and I figured why not give it a shot and see if it works? Maybe I’ll find something I didn’t know that I had. It didn’t work out that way, so I ended up going back.”